Duke: 34 MBA students punished for cheating – www.boston.com: Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business disciplined 34 first-year master of business administration students who were caught in the school’s largest cheating scandal.
Fuqua investigated 38 students, marketing professor Gavan J. Fitzsimmons, who oversees the school’s judicial panel, said. Four were cleared and 34 received disciplinary action ranging from expulsion to failing grades.
The allegations are the largest to hit a top US business school since 2005. Schools have been strengthening their ethics curriculums after scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom, which landed the firms in bankruptcy and their leaders in jail. Fuqua posts an honor code that covers cheating in every classroom.
The problem came to light when a professor noticed similarities in answers by students on a take-home test.
I guess they should stick to basketball.
Just taking their clues from the CEOs of the world.
Cheating has been rampant in universities for many years now with school administrations doing nothing about. That degree you have isn’t worth the paper it is printed on, you might as well have paid $50.00 and bought it online, or better yet print it out yourself.
What do you expect from MBAs? It not like the degree means anything. It’s just a door way to middle management and a nice paying job. The only down side is that they “manage” people that actually know what they are doing.
This is not news. Everybody cheats in one way or another.
IT WAS A TAKE HOME TEST?? WTF How can u cheat on a TAKE HOME test?
This should surprise nobody. Business school has always had the highest level of cheating. Good to see they’re finally busting these people.
I wonder what kind of grades these students have. Is cheating changing the curves in classes? Is it forcing instructors to make harder exams? Are admissions changing to favor the best cheaters? These issues go far beyond the classroom.
I know a manager who had an underling do his MBO assignments for him. I guess he thought he was showing leadership.
I find it interesting that some of the people comment on the rampant level of cheating going on for MBAs. I wonder if any of them ever attempted to complain about it to their professors or other college authorities.
I just want to point out that in the United States masters and doctoral degree students would be called graduate students and not post-graduate which is a British term, it tripped me up for a minute to see that in the headline.
I wonder what kind of grades these students have. Is cheating changing the curves in classes? Is it forcing instructors to make harder exams? Are admissions changing to favor the best cheaters? These issues go far beyond the classroom.
These students were probably all over-achievers. Duke is sort of like a cross between Harvard and MIT… you have to be rich AND smart to get in.
It’s like steroid use in sports. When the level of competition is so fierce and close, if one player does it, everyone else is under pressure to do the same or be left in the dust.
J. B. Fuqua is now spinning about 33 rpm in his grave, rest his brilliant soul. Duke library let him borrow books even though he wasn’t a student. To repay them, J. B. donated $100 million to build the Fuqua School of Business at Duke. Tough to make that much dough as an honest man.
It was a TAKE-HOME test!
If you want to stop cheating, then conduct the test under ADULT SUPERVISION !!! Duh!
and who came up with the dumb school name of Fuqua School of Business?
Duke, producing future Washington insiders every day!
My advise to teachers is simple: Make sure every the students handwrite every homework they deliver because even if they cheat and copy it, they’ll be forced to read AND write it, so wether they like it or not they’ll something will stick to their heads.
I don’t get it, it’s a freaking take-home test, they should have easily rewritten the answers in their own words..
I thought in Business it was STANDARD practice to CHEAT anyway you COULD…. I will BEt the test was NOT to get caught cheating.
A take-home exam? What is next, a take-away exam?
No wonder so many people get A’s at Duke. A take home exam seems very pathetic to me–those kids are basically spoon fed their high grades. Must be another way for duke to increase its colelge rankings. In the meantime, students are public universities are struggling to get a B due to ruthless curves and the difficulty of exams.
You guys really don’t understand how a take home exam works, do you?
Other than in school were in life did you get asked questions and can’t go look for answers and then intelligently present your findings. Do you go to work and your boss goes ‘Ok everyone turn off your computers, shut down your phones and lets see how well you can cite the operations manual procedure for cross departmental cooperation’ No wonder kids can’t think when they get in the real world.
#19
They’re supposed to be horrible and grueling, forcing you to work on it for hours and hours, either because the heavy workload you have to do with them or because they demand a thorough analisis.
#21 You got that right! I remember a midterm calculus exam that included one take-home problem. I spent eight hours working that beast. The sad part was that the problem was worth no more credit than one of the 20-minute problems worked during class.
Years later when I was working on my masters, the professor gave us students the option of a two-hour proctored exam or a Thanksgiving-weekend take home. Against my vocal objection, the class voted for a take home. Idiots. Worse Thanksgiving I ever had.
On 13. The guy that came up with the name was probably the person who took the big fat checks from J. B. Fuqua.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._Fuqua
#5 gquaglia speak for your self, “Everybody cheats”. Everybody is a very very big word that you can never justify.
It’s about knowing what’s important, it’s spectrum or range; whether, what interest you is the approval received from others on image and appearances, or what yourself knows of thyself on the inside.
Cheaters are all about image and appearances, period. They are surface dwellers and expect and demand of others to do the same to justify and exonerate themselves.
Then there are people who study for the sake of learning and maintain for themselves a sense of self integrity. Cheaters hate these people!
People who learn for the sake of understanding and knowing; who, often bore and irritate “surface dwellers” with their exuberant discussions of detail and knowledge. We call these people NERDS, people perched on their high horse!
God Bless NERDs, without them there wouldn’t be Apple and many other great companies that hire cheating surface dwelling MBAs!
#24
Apple was created by a HUGE nerd, Steve Wozniak; but it took a sleazy man like Steve Jobs to get the vision of how big Apple could be; Wozniak the NERD is gone while Jobs is back at the helm of Apple.
Just to clarify for the brilliant minds here (from a Fuqua classmate) The test was take home because it was a computer models class requiring simulations of 100k iterations. It took about 12 hours to complete. If you think a take-home exam is a joke, you’ve obviously never been in a class hard enough to require one.
Are you sure these students weren’t being framed by some crazy prosecutors, especially after the case where a stripper lied to the police for being raped by Duke of Biohazard lacrosse team students? It sounded like another scapegoat charge for the ill-fated school.